James Schuyler’s Queer Poetics

What I love most about James Schuyler’s poetry is its queerness—and by that, I don’t just mean his sexuality. I mean queerness in a more expansive sense. It’s the kind of fluid, non-linear, open-ended queerness that Jack Halberstam explores, in part, in The Queer Art of Failure. Schuyler’s poems rarely declare—instead, they attend, resisting certainty. They lean into presence rather than closure. At the core of his poetics is a belief that to observe something truly is to honor it. He offers what we might call a queer poetics of attention—a way of noticing the world that is aesthetic, spiritual, ecological, and ethical all at once. In a world structured by control, clarity, and domination, Schuyler insists on ambiguity, drift, and openness—queer qualities in both form and spirit.

This queer poetics is certainly evident in Schuyler’s poem “The Crystal Lithium,” one of his most well-known poems. You don’t so much read the poem as drift through it—and it drifts through you. Built from impressions, flickers, and discontinuous moments, the poem enacts what Schuyler called the “unchanging change” (119) of the world. One moment, we encounter the largely goofily described months of the year and then a flatcar-trailer (117–118); next, goat turds and then Goethe (118). The poem resists resolution. Its awareness does not arise from logic or narrative but from surrendering, like with a Zen koan. 

Even the title, “The Crystal Lithium,” functions much like a koan. The words don’t explain each other—they resonate. Upon first encounter, the title evokes a feeling: something stable, clear, maybe even healing. Lithium is both a chemical element and a mood stabilizer, grounding the body in balance. A crystal is clear, faceted, but also fragile. Together, they gesture toward a truth at the heart of Schuyler’s work: that seeing clearly, noticing deeply, being present—can be stabilizing in a destabilized world, even if it embraces ambiguity. This resonance is especially poignant given Schuyler’s own struggles with mental illness. As Eileen Myles writes, “I wondered if the act of the writing a poem was a kind of balancing for him.” His poems are practices of presence.

Observation, then, becomes Schuyler’s stabilizing force. His poems are built from it. As David Lehman writes, “[W]hat is most singular about Schuyler’s poetry is his Keatsian conviction that true things truly observed will provide all the beauty one needs in a world however fallen” (278). Schuyler gives attention to, in part, a hangnail, a Christmas tree stripped bare, a fishing line wound around a gull (116). These are not beautiful images, but they are truly seen. This truthful seeing links Schuyler to John Clare, who also wrote with intimacy toward the world—through presence, not mastery. Clare peered into the bottoms of hedgerows and found entire ecosystems: birds’ nests built from thistledown, grass, and other materials.

Both Clare and Schuyler remind us that what we see, we are responsible for. The world is not just metaphor or background. It is entangled with us. Timothy Morton calls this “ecological thought”: the awareness that we are already meshed with the world around us, “strange strangers” included. A nest is never just one nest—it is part of a fragile, interconnected mesh (Morton 28). In “The Crystal Lithium,” we feel this mesh even more when it is disrupted. The fishing line strangling the gull is not merely an image—it is a call to witness. This, too, is part of Schuyler’s queer poetics of attention: to observe is not neutral. It is a felt response to care. 

That poetics of care is reinforced by Schuyler’s formal resistance to narrative control. Many of his poems do not impose order on time; rather, they drift with it. Lehman notes that Schuyler’s poems are shaped by time passing (267), and in “The Crystal Lithium,” time becomes atmospheric, like weather. It moves from present to past to perception without hierarchy. As Schuyler puts it, this is the feeling of “memory-flavor” (119)—an evanescent trace of experience. In one line, he makes an emotional comparison, as if he or the reader is remembering it, with a person saying something inconceivable before casually resuming a mundane task like washing dishes before drifting to the sky, which “Flows with impersonal passion and loosening jet trails (eyes tearing from / the cold) / And on the beach, between foam frozen in a thick scalloped edging so / like / Weird cheek-mottling pillowcase embroidery…” (118). Time is not linear but drifting—a medium of being rather than a structure of order.

Alongside this drifting temporality is a fluid, relational self. Schuyler’s poetry resists the fixed “I” and the knowable “you.” Lehman observes that many of his poems feature a “composite and variable ‘you’” (267), one that blurs the lines between speaker, reader, and world; his “communings with the self and the cosmos” (254) dissolve boundaries altogether. This is a deeply queer move: to refuse the singular, stable identity in favor of something more relational and shifting. As Will Storr puts it, “We believe we’re in control of ourselves but we’re continually being altered by the world and people around us. . . . [T]he dramatic question of who we are never has a final and truly satisfying answer” (128). Schuyler seems to agree. You are not separate from what you observe. The fishing line is not separate from the bird. You are not separate from the sea (116). The world is interconnected, and the self, like the world, is always in motion. Heraclitus was aware of this as was, of course, the Buddha. 

In a world that demands clarity, conclusions, categories, and outcomes, Schuyler’s poetry lingers in ambiguity. A poem, like the world, does not have to make typical sense to matter. Schuyler offers more than a way of writing; he offers a way of seeing—one that is intimate, attentive, ethical, and queer. Like Clare, he reminds us that attention is not passive. It is a form of care. To drift is not to disengage. It is to remain open, to observe without domination. In this way, Schuyler’s queer poetics becomes a spiritual and ecological practice—one that honors a world always in flux.

—Iain Grinbergs

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Works Cited

Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. Anchor Books, 1998.

Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard UP, 2010.

Myles, Eileen. “Inside, Outside & Jimmy.” Poetry Magazine, 2009, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/blog/uncategorized/52352/inside-outside-jimmy.

Schuyler, James. Collected Poems. FSG, 1993.

Storr, Will. The Science of Storytelling. Abrams Press, 2020.

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